Easy Rider

I waggled my Press Card at the Royal Academy desk this afternoon and visited Dennis Hopper: the lost album. I was quite impressed, especially by his work in Mexico.

Interestingly Dennis only used photography as his creative outlet between 1961 and 1967, after which film making took over and stills were abandoned.

I secretly hoped there was real film in his camera when he played the photojournalist in Apocalypse now.

There follows some trivia I gleaned from the interweb

" The character of the photojournalist, played by Dennis Hopper, was first suggested by Chas Gerretsen, unit photographer and Robert Capa, Gold Medal Award winner (1973) during a lunch with Francis Ford Coppola. During the lunch, they discussed the scene where an American TV correspondent (played by Coppola) yells at some passing soldiers, "Don't look at the camera". Gerretsen suggested that if Coppola wanted to portray the manic side of the press, he should use a photojournalist because "we were all crazy". The three black body Nikon F cameras that Hopper's character carried, had been used by Gerretsen in Vietnam. He sold the three cameras to Zoetrope Studios after Hopper, who'd originally been cast as Lt.Colby, became the photojournalist. Gerretsen used three Nikon F2 cameras and one Leica M4 during the filming of Apocalypse Now (1979). He didn't like using blimps (sound boxes) because it prevented him from immediately shooting an image when he saw it (as he'd learned as a photojournalist). Coppola gave him permission to shoot during filming in between the dialogue (except for Marlon Brando's dialogue), to the great unhappiness of the sound-man, who had to edit out the clicking of the camera. "